I found an interesting recent post on the emergencemarketing blog today summarizing online advertising measurement research published by McKinsey.  For me, the most important finding is that marketers who measure the impact of their online media are significantly more satisfied with their digital marketing than those who don’t. This makes perfect sense, so why is it that only 50% of marketers use basic measurement like CTR?

Are they/we really not accountable for results – as EM suggests?  Do we need better measurement techniques – as McKinsey concludes?  Or is it something more?

In his “Six Predictions for 2007” Mark Kingdon of ClickZ says, “Engaging Reach Emerges as a Mantra for Advertisers: In the world of digital communications, ‘reach’ is just step one, not an end goal. Simply reaching a consumer isn’t enough. And if you focus solely on engagement, you won’t reach enough viewers to make an impact. That’s why it makes a lot of sense to measure ‘engaging reach.’ First, we must look deeper when it comes to online advertising metrics.”

Looking at how engaged IT buyers are with advertiser content has become a real focal point in the IT advertising space. At TechTarget we are investing in analytical tools that can help us determine various aspects of engagement. It is simply not enough to demonstrate that someone has seen your ad or responded to your content. IT advertisers want to know how long they perused your content, what they did with it once they downloaded it, who they passed it along to.

Additionally, advertisers want to know how their sponsored content is perceived by users compared to editorial content and other competitively sponsored content. Consequently, publishers are being asked to conduct analyses and deliver metrics that rank user interaction and preferences with content.

A certain commonality among digital advertisers, whether they are consumer or BtoB, is their realization that online advertising and how performance is defined is in a constant state of evolution. Yesterday’s metrics will always be replaced by tomorrow’s and it’s incumbent on all of us to stay on top of it all.

Direct Marketing Association recently quoted that by 2008, online marketing will be the dominant media for business-to business.

It’s more important than ever to understand how to launch a successful online marketing campaign.

Omniture recently published a report, B2B Online Marketing Guide:  5 Critical Steps that outlines successful tips to help better your online lead generation program.  One of the first steps outlined is to define the key performance indicators (KPIs).  Surprisingly, we often find that many companies do not clearly define the KPIs before the campaign begins. And, Sales and Marketing often have very different metrics of success.

To have a successful online campaign, it is imperative to understand what your key performance indicators (KPIs) are at the onset of the program.

How do you establish key performance indicators with your online programs?

I read a very interesting article this week on ClickZ entitled “The End of Lazy Marketing.” The author, Mark Kingdon, makes the following observations:

* The Internet is quickly becoming the “can’t live without” choice over TV.
* Creation and connection rule as the social Web becomes the big story of 2006. There are more people on MySpace today than were Internet users in the US in 1998.
* People are walking Tivos as they unconsciously and consciously filter out the 3,000+ messages we blitz them with every day.
* The Internet accounts for only 6 percent of marketing spend and 24 percent of consumers’ media consumption. Very quickly, those figures will equalize at the expense of TV and print.

The underlying theme here is that you cannot rely on being able to reach your audience through broad or “lazy” means anymore. In order to increase effectiveness of your marketing, it must be contextual/environment-specific marketing and it must have an eye towards increased engagement. This is not just about spending more money online and less on TV, but about making sure your message is being heard loud and clear. Less eyeballs does not necessarily equate to lower traction. At TechTarget, we have moved towards a topically-based approach to communicating to our user base and have seen the response and engagement increase dramatically. Along these lines, RSS feeds, while still in relative infancy, are also gaining traction - the idea being “show me only what I am looking for.”

Are you currently integrating this approach into your marketing efforts?

After running thousands of papers on our sites, we have seen over and over again that educational papers always outperform product focused papers. However, many vendors still feel compelled to write exclusively on their product or solution.

I just read a very strong book on this topic by, Michael Stelzner, “Writing White Papers:  How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged” about how to write a successful write paper. This book carefully explains how important it is not to be self serving or focused exclusively on a product, service or solution.  Instead, a white paper should focus on the pain points experienced by the reader and talk about the problems caused by those pains.  No matter, how experienced you are in writing white papers, this book could help everyone gain some useful knowledge.  What has been your experience with product vs. educational white papers?

I notice that clients are looking for a better way to measure the effectiveness of branding.  They have issues understanding how relevant their company, product, service or concept is in the marketplace. Being able to measure the potential effectiveness of a program before launching a broad initiative or understanding to what level of awareness, leadership, or purchase intent a company currently has with a segment of their audience could save millions of dollars in marketing expenses.  This type of intelligence also enables better sales opportunities, shorter sales cycles and higher profit margins.  For example, we measure branding success through pre- and post-campaign surveying online to compare the changes, but how do others do it?  What type of goals do vendors try and use to measure their branding?

Clients often come to us looking for comparisons of results of one media vs the other in terms of lead generation.

Recently a data backup/recovery company came to us with a unique challenge.  They were looking to target IT decision makers who are responsible for backup at small/medium-sized businesses.  In the past, this client had great success promoting white papers to the Storage audience. Now, they wanted to test the effectiveness of a webcast vs. the white paper.

To help them accomplish this, we customized a program promoting both media products, the white paper and webcast equally.  We used numerous push out emails and banners to the same Storage audience.  As we had expected,  there was a higher quantity of white paper leads than webcast leads.  However, the leads were then sent to a telemarketing team and the webcast leads proved to be more highly qualified in that they were further along the sales cycle.  The white paper leads still needed more nurturing.

We’ve always believed that IT pros who take an hour out of their day to attend a webcast are ready to short-list a final vendor recommendation. This exercise reinforced that.